8INTRODUCTIONas a concept, and remain relatively abstract. Poetry has the potential of
engaging the physical being, the individual creature. It can originate in
direct experience and emotion, retain mystery, and blur boundaries.
Interestingly, many recent critics have argued for the special ability
of poetry to generate ecological awareness more generally. For instance,
Jonathan Bate suggests that inherent in poetry is a desire or force that
turns our gaze outward, to the earth: “Poesis in the sense of verse-
making is language’s most direct path of return to the oikos, the place of
dwelling, because metre itself—a quiet but persistent music, a recurring
cycle, a heartbeat—is an answering to nature’s own rhythms, an echo-
ing of the song of the earth itself.”^17 Bate makes the extraordinary claim
that the poet could be “a keystone subspecies of Homo Sapiens... ,
potentially the saviour of ecosystems,”^18 because poetry is uniquely
capable of revealing and producing how we dwell in the land. So too
Angus Fletcher finds in a distinctive mode of American poetry the abil-
ity both to dissolve seemingly entrenched binaries and to create a new
awareness of environment as a place actively inhabited by the self of the
poet and his or her readers. The “environment-poem,” as he calls it,
“does not merely suggest or indicate an environment as part of its the-
matic meaning, but actually gets the reader to enter into the poem as if
it were the reader’s environment of living.”^19 Poetry does not escape the
world or reify individual being so much as depend upon a poet’s desire
to become aware of her many entanglements with others and, through
careful description, with the world at large. However, Fletcher makes no
allowance for poetry to bridge the gap between human and animal.
Indeed, when he reads a poem about an animal (John Clare’s “Mouse’s
Nest”), he sees it as descriptive of the poet’s connection to landscape
rather than to another sentient being. So too Bate allows that ecopoesis
might “engage imaginatively with the non-human” but does little to
develop the idea.^20 Leonard Scigaj’s account of the work of “sustainable
poetry” similarly focuses on poetry that “treats nature as a separate
and equal other and includes respect for nature conceived as a series of
ecosystems— dynamic and potentially self-regulating cycling feedback
systems,” but this focus on vaguely defined systems apparently leaves
little room for the sentient beings who live in them.^21